Physiological State Can Help Predict the Perceived Emotion of Music: Evidence from ECG and EDA Signals

As the soul of music, emotion information is widely used in music retrieval and recommendation systems because the pursuit of emotional experience is the main motivation for music listening. In the field of music emotion recognition, computer scientists investigated computation models to automatically detect the perceived emotion of music, but this method ignores the differences between listeners. To provide users with the most accurate music emotion information, this study investigated the effects of physiological features on personalized music emotion recognition (PMER) models, which can automatically identify an individual’s perceived emotion of music. Applying machine learning methods, we formed relations among audio features, physiological features, and music emotions. First, computational modeling analysis shows that physiological features extracted from electrocardiogram and electro-dermal activity signals can predict the perception of music emotion for some individuals. Second, we compared the performance of physiological feature-based perception and feeling models and observed substantial individual differences. In addition, we found that the performance of the perception model and the feeling model is related in predicting happy, relaxed, and sad emotions. Finally, by adding physiological features to the audio-based PMER model, the prediction effect of some individuals was improved. Our work investigated the relationship between physiological state and perceived emotion of music, constructed models with practical value, and provided a reference for the optimization of PMER systems.